The Leafs should fire Randy Carlyle. In fact, they should have done it months ago.

If you were listening to sports radio in Toronto on Monday, you would have heard a quote rehashed and re-appropriated. It was a remark from 2012, when then-general manager of the Maple Leafs, Brian Burke, said the team’s then-record of 1-8-1 was like an “18-wheeler going right off a cliff.” So, the joke today is a pretty simple one: Burke, due back in town Tuesday night with his visiting Calgary Flames, would likely arrive driving a tractor-trailer.

That’s because the Leafs have now only managed two wins in 11 games, the last of which came over two weeks ago. Meaning, going in to Tuesday’s game against the Flames (with six wins in their last 10), the Leafs have dropped eight straight.

As it happens, the year Burke made that remark was the same year (the same month, actually) he dumped coach Ron Wilson, whose record behind the bench in Toronto was mixed at best in the regular season and nonexistent in the post-season. The Leafs didn’t make the playoffs once during his four year tenure. So, is it time for current Leafs manager, Dave Nonis, to do the same to Randy Carlyle, the man steering things at ice level in Toronto now?

Probably. In fact, it’s sort of amazing it hasn’t already happened.

Let’s rewind to mid-December. Things were bleak. Aside from a stunning Saturday night 7-3 victory against the Chicago Blackhawks on December 14 at the Air Canada Centre, the Leafs had only scored 11 goals in their previous eight games at home, and their top line was in the minuses. Christmas didn’t solve anything. As the new year began, their puck possession was still horrendous, they’d been outscored 102 to 69 since the start of November, and they were allowing somewhere north of 36 shots against per game. It was all enough for James Mirtle at the Globe and Mail to go on a tirade on January 9:

“This is a bad hockey team playing very bad hockey right now, a group made worse by some of the bizarre decisions made by head coach Randy Carlyle night after night."

Those decisions included, at the time: benching offensive defencemen in favour of bigger guys who struggled with puck possession; dressing enforcers only to have them sit on the bench for the entire game; and ostracizing “useful player after useful player.”

And of course, with the last one, came two names: Grabovski and MacArthur.

In July, when Mikhail Grabovski left the Leafs after a five-year run, he had nothing but expletives to lob at Carlyle on his way out the door. “I play in the fucking Russian KHL, I make lots of fucking points and what’s going to happen?” Grabovski asked rhetorically at his final press conference in Toronto. “He make me fucking play on the fourth line and he put me in the playoffs on the fourth line and third line again.”

As for MacArthur? “It’s one of those things where he runs the show there and everyone knows that and that’s the way it is,” he said after leaving the team.

Those were the kind of testimonials that sprang to mind a week ago, following Toronto’s 3-2 loss to the Detroit Red Wings. The loss put them at .500 coming out of the Sochi break. Afterward, Carlyle summarized his goalie’s performance: “I thought he was OK, just OK.” James Reimer’s response when he was told of Carlyle’s assessment: “He said just OK? I thought I was good.” Reimer’s agent, Ray Petkau, tweeted, “As is customary in Toronto, when your team plays poor defensively game after game you blame your goalie,” and reportedly hinted at “issues” that will be addressed after the season’s over.

It’s easy (maybe too easy) to look at a losing team like the Leafs and start connecting dots. They are likely not all related, or inter-related, or even maybe related by marriage. But clearly some of them are – enough to make this team a losing franchise, anyway. Which is enough to matter.

It’s also very easy at times like this to simply blame the coach. Upper management, too, should shoulder some responsibility. But it appears to this point that this is a team (if not the team) Nonis wants. It’s at the very least one he has thought valuable enough to not only turn down trade offers from elsewhere, but indeed solidify one piece of for many (many) years. So, even if the lineup shifts a bit in the off-season, we shouldn’t expect an overhaul, nor is one really needed. There seems a much simpler path toward change at hand. It’s just a matter of time.